Metaverse

Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) recently highlighted concerns over Metaverse.

About Metaverse:

• Metaverse is a blockchain-based virtual world with different types of enhanced online environments.
• It visualizes of a single, shared, immersive, persistent, 3D virtual space where humans experience life in ways they could not in the physical world.
• The term was coined in 1992 by Neal Stephenson in his sci-fi novel Snow Crash, and the development of technologies that underpin a virtual reality-based internet date back decades.
• Some of the technologies include, Virtual Reality (VR) headsets and Augmented Reality (AR) glasses.
  • AR augments surroundings by adding digital elements to a live view, while VR replaces a real-life environment with a simulated one.
• It strives to dissolve the boundary between the physical and digital worlds, linking them via geographical gaps and enhance global cooperation.
• Other components of metaverse like adequate bandwidth or interoperability standards, are upcoming technologies in this domain.

Concerns over Metaverse:

• TRAI raised critical issues such as privacy, safety, and security which require greater deliberation.
• This technology will track all the personal details of users like place of visit, facial expressions, vocal inflections, and vital signs.
• Intelligent algorithms use such data to predict each person’s real-time emotional state, monitoring of user gait and posture, and assess details of browsed products or services.
• This can be invasive in the augmented metaverse for manual reach of users, assessing when users will grab objects (both real and virtual).
• ‘Online predators’ might spread hate speech and mistrust among the current and future online generations.
• An appropriate regulatory framework can be applied to online applications for snooping, data breaches, harassment, and hate speech, which could increase owing to increased digitization and online activities.

About Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI):

• It is a regulatory body established under Telecom Regulatory Authority of India Act, 1997, to regulate telecom services in India.
• It includes fixation/revision of tariffs for telecom services which were earlier vested in the Central Government.
• Main objective: To provide a fair and transparent policy environment which promotes a level playing field and facilitates fair competition.

Ref: Source